Josh Hammer
speaker
197 appearances
8 recordings
4 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 31 Mar
Josh Hammer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
was just one grand extensive example as to the realist MAGA America First case for U.S.-Israel relations. The basic case, Andrew, looks something like this. If you're an America First person, if you think that America has dwindling resources on the national stage there, then you have to understand that our number one threat this century actually comes from China. That should be fairly clear.
America's civilizational challenge in the 21st century comes from the Chinese Communist Party. And accordingly, we absolutely do have to reprioritize resources towards the Indo-Pacific. The relevant question, Andrew, is... How do we do that while simultaneously safeguarding our interests in the region?
You saw Donald Trump just this weekend, actually, in his lengthy post on Truth Social, talk about, for instance, the importance of the Red Sea, which is a core international waterway here. And he says that America should start bombing the crap basically out of the Houthis there. I'm happy he's doing that.
But the point is that America is always going to have various interests in this particular part of the world when it comes to oil and natural gas, when it comes to radical Islamic jihad. We just saw the Bourbon Street massacre, tragically, on New Year's Day just two and a half months ago.
So the question then, the question, Andrew, is how can we make sure that America's interests are secured in the Middle East while simultaneously allowing us to – ourselves prioritize on the Indo-Pacific. And the solution is to embolden our like-minded allies in the region to patrol this region essentially on our behalf. That was the whole purpose of the Abraham Accords.
That's why I mentioned the Trump foreign policy from the first term, this idea. that you will embolden Israel, that you will strengthen U.S.-Israel ties, bring Israel into these peace accords with, in that case, the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan, and then essentially pass them the baton and say, okay, you know, you guys do your thing because your enemies are our enemies there.
When you're knocking off this jihadist or that jihadist, you're basically doing both of us a favor there. And last year, there were actually some very important concrete examples of this. This is actually in chapter six of my book there. So for instance,
There were a few months, Andrew, last year where Israel kind of went on this Michael Corleone kind of godfather-esque, you know, revenge killing spree. And among the leading jihadists that they killed there, they basically took off the entirety of the Hezbollah leadership up to and including Hassan Nasrallah, the longstanding leader itself.
But before they got Nasrallah, they knocked off two individuals who I like to mention. One guy named Fuad Shakur, the other named Ibrahim Akil. Why do I mention these two guys by name? They were the ones who were responsible for the 1983 Beirut-Lebanon bombings of the U.S. Marine barracks and the U.S. embassy. In fact, the U.S.
State Department had a $5 and $7 million bounty on those two jihadis' head for over four decades until Israel literally did the job for us there. So this notion that America does not in any way benefit here, this notion that we don't have the same enemies, it's ludicrous. We have exactly the same enemies there. And this is frankly a realist way
to focus our resources on the Far East while essentially securing our interests in the region. So it's a perfect fit for a foreign policy realism. This notion that Israel is kind of this antiquated Bush administration neoconservative issue, it's total nonsense. Frankly, actually, a lot of the neocons aren't actually even particularly stalwart supporters.
of the state of Israel there because they're obsessed with the idea of nation building. They're obsessed with the idea of trying to democratize, and they oftentimes get too involved in trying to carve out a brand-new Palestinian Arab state and all the same failed experiments that ultimately met their ruination in Baghdad, Iraq, and so forth there.
So it's actually the neoconservatives, frankly, who are oftentimes not great supporters there. I happen to think that U.S.-Israel relations are – a perfect fit for a foreign policy realist, MAGA, America first paradigm approach there.
But the broader book, and pardon my filibuster there, but the broader book, Andrew, is making this fundamental case that Jews and Christians also have to be lockstep, arms to arms, linking arms, shoulder to shoulder here. We say the Western civilization is at a crossroads. We're at an inflection point. And I totally agree with that. But I'm also a lawyer, Andrew, and I like to define terms.
What is the West? Well, I mean, you know, we kind of sort of know, you know, it's Jerusalem, it's Athens there. But to me, when we say the West, we're really talking above all about the Bible. We're talking above all about the Judeo-Christian heritage. I argue going back all the way to God's revelation to Moses and the Israelites at Mount Sinai, so much of what we take for granted today
in our constitutional structure, in our day-to-day lives, in our law, in our morals, in our ethics there. It all goes back actually to what we Jews call the Torah, what Christians call the Old Testament. So much of it is in there. And I really painstakingly kind of explain this in the chapters and all throughout there.
But the point, Andrew, is that unless we in the West, Jews and Christians, shoulder to shoulder, linking arms in lockstep accord here, Unless we double down on our biblical heritage, I do not think that we are going to be adequately equipped to push back against the three hegemonic forces that seek to destroy us, which I identify as wokeism, Islamism, and global neoliberalism.
You have to stand for something. Values neutrality is never an option. You want to defeat the wokes, defeat the radicalismists, you got to stand for something. That's something, Andrew. That's something is the Bible.
Yeah, look, I'll give you just one example that really kind of drives this point home. So I was giving a talk in Washington, D.C. this past summer to a generally younger audience. I kind of noticed this guy who was dressed a little funny standing in the back, who was like, you know, very vigorously nodding along to what I had to say. So he approaches me afterwards. He's from Iran.
He grew up in Tehran there. And he told me that... Growing up in his K-12 and his education there, their equivalent of saying the Pledge of Allegiance every day, like we in the United States do, their equivalent in Iran is they basically say, I solemnly vow to do all that I can to help destroy the little Satan of Israel and the great Satan of America. They actually believe this stuff.
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